The notion that the IRGC is making a bid for power that had long evaded it is, frankly, risible. It is no doubt taking advantage of the state of emergency to reinforce its position, but then all militaries, even in non-authoritarian states, enjoy a position of pre-eminence in time of war. There may be an argument that it will seek to prolong the war because its leaders are more fearful of the peace that will follow; but it is altogether different to suggest that the IRGC’s seizure of power has been predicated on the conflict itself. The rise of the Revolutionary Guards has long been in gestation, and their present dominance as a political-military conglomerate is tied closely to the related rise of Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mojtaba first emerged into the political limelight in 2005, when he was accused by one of the contenders in that year’s presidential elections, Mehdi Karrubi, of having interfered to ensure the success of his protegé, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ever since, his political activities have been a matter of intense controversy in the Islamic Republic, not least because of his character and the hereditary trajectory his emergence implied. The 2005 presidential election was intended to be the crowning moment of the rise of the hardline “principle-ists” — coined from the Persian translation for “fundamentalist” — and the eclipse of the reformists who had ostensibly dominated the political scene since the election of Mohammad Khatami in a shock landslide victory in 1997. So horrified had hardliners been at this reformist turn that they determined to eliminate it as a political force.

Under the ideological mentorship of the uncompromising authoritarian, Ayatollah Misbah-Yazdi, himself also a mentor to Mojtaba, the hardliners developed a framework for the seizing of power, centred on the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. Around him, they built a cult of personality. For Misbah-Yazdi, the Supreme Leader was far more than a constitutional position — it was a sacred calling, a pillar of belief against which one’s identification as a true Muslim could be defined. Indeed, as Misbah-Yazdi contentiously argued, to deny the principle of the Guardianship of the Jurist (velayat-e faqih) — in other words, to deny the Supreme Leader — was to deny one of the principal pillars of Islam. Adherence to the constitution of the Islamic Republic became a sacred duty, and to challenge it was heresy.

To reinforce this conviction, Khamenei was increasingly identified as the “Ali of the Age”, in emulation of the Imam Ali, whose hereditary successors were considered to be the rightful leaders of the Islamic community, and whose followers became known as Shia. This was an extraordinary claim to make, and few outside the “elect” either understood or appreciated its significance. It was first publicly promoted on Iranian television in the early 2000s, when one Ali Larijani was in charge of state broadcasting. More suspicious types were wary of this development, and its implication of hereditary succession, but when Karrubi raised the red flag in 2005, he was dismissed as a sore loser.

Misbah-Yazdi’s project incorporated the IRGC, which became the armed wing of the movement. Having moved away from the “brotherhood in arms” of the Iran-Iraq War, it had through the Nineties reshaped itself as an ideological army with growing business interests, though these were as yet modest. When, in 1999, it challenged the then-reformist president to suppress student discontent “or else”, it found itself at the sharp end of a rebuke. Were the Revolutionary Guards not aware, retorted Khatami, that the father of the revolution himself, Ayatollah Khomeini, had told the armed forces to stay out of politics? The IRGC’s response, albeit at this stage tempered by realities, was that as a Revolutionary Guard, it existed to protect the revolution: from enemies both without and within.

With this ideological and material framework established, the plan was now to overturn the popularity of the reformists with a populist of their own. The IRGC found its man in Ahmadinejad, a hitherto-unknown lecturer close to the Basij militia. Ahmadinejad was generally dismissed as an obsessive who was preoccupied in his relationship with the “Hidden Imam”, the twelfth of the hereditary Shia imams who had disappeared, or gone into “occultation”, sometime in the 9th century. Even revolutionary diehards found him tiresome. But Ahmadinejad did have the populist touch and found favour with the Basij, which could provide the infrastructure for his forthcoming campaigns.

In the 2003 “local elections”, an extremely low turnout ensured Ahmadinejad’s emergence as the mayor of Tehran, providing him with a platform for his populism. Parts of the Western media were suitably impressed by the dynamic “Dr” Ahmadinejad, even as Iranians mocked his risible PhD thesis on traffic management. Ahmadinejad’s religious susceptibilities, and his folksy superstitions, made him the ideal candidate for the project to come, though his pretensions were eventually to sour his relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei. Initially, however, Khamenei had nothing but praise, and his son was dispatched to arrange Ahmadinejad’s ensuing electoral victories. In 2004, the parliamentary elections were rigged to ensure a principle-ist victory; in 2005, with Mojtaba’s management of the Basij, Ahmadinejad stormed from being a nobody to the prime contender in a matter of weeks.

Karrubi, who everyone expected to be in the run-off, was not impressed by this turn of events, and made his feelings felt. At this stage, some reformists warned about the development of an “Islamic monarchy”, pointing to the new sense of deference that was accorded to Khamenei, notably including hand-kissing. But few ventured further, or else considered hereditary succession a remote possibility. Such things, it was argued, went against the “principles” of the revolution. It did not, however, go against tradition, be it Persian or Shia, nor did it account for the practicalities of retaining power in an Islamic Republic that was inexorably shedding its republican skin.

If there were any doubts as to the direction of travel, these were laid to rest in the “Green Movement” protests of 2009, the suppression of which Mojtaba was widely involved in. It was in this period of heightened crisis that Misbah-Yazdi made the extraordinary claim that, since Ayatollah Khamenei was the replacement of the Hidden Imam, obedience to him —  and by extension, to the president he approved — equated to obedience to God. This claim was so shocking, not least to many traditional clerics, that it was suppressed in the press. But the cult was clearly now well established; opponents were decried as heretics and therefore beyond the law; and concerns over a planned dynastic succession had people voicing concerns about an “Umayyad” succession — a reference to the first Caliphal dynasty which Shias in particular condemn as the establishment of an Arab kingdom.

With the Green Movement crushed, it should have been apparent that the theoretical and practical justifications for dynastic succession were being put firmly in place. (When I’ve made this point from time to time since 2009, it was dismissed as incompatible with the “republican” principles of the revolution, with one analyst memorably telling me they would “eat their hat” if it ever happened. I hope it’s tasty).

A renewed tolerance of the idea of “monarchy” gathered pace in this period. Ahmadinejad systematically stripped the republican institutions of any real power, transferring them to the revolutionary organs of power: the Supreme Leadership and the IRGC. The institutional emasculation that took place was widely commented on. Even conservatives noted that parliament had been stripped of any effective power, with a succession of rigged elections stuffing it with hardline apparatchiks who competed for the favour of the Supreme Leader. The Guardian Council, whose membership was already partly nominated by the Supreme Leader, became another cypher, while the Assembly of Experts, which ostensibly existed to hold the Supreme Leader to account, became a talking shop of aging clerics — who increasingly pointed out that their role was not to select the new Leader, but merely to recognise whomsoever God had chosen.

This, in short, was government by personality, not institutions, and it all revolved around the personality of Ali Khamenei, the Ali of the Age, and the replacement — not representative — of the Hidden Imam. It is testament to the boldness of this idea that many resisted it as antithetical to the spirit of the Islamic Republic. But the “Islamic Republic” was itself an innovation, not only in its republican turn but in its application of Khomeini’s notion of the Guardianship of the Jurist. For many principle-ists, indeed, the Islamic Republic was merely a transitory affair towards the much purer Islamic state shorn of any democratic heresies.

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Meanwhile, Mojtaba was quietly rising up the ranks of the clerical hierarchy, being promoted as an “ayatollah” in his forties, a remarkably young age for such an achievement. Later, ostensibly in order to broaden his appeal, some suggested that he would be Iran’s MBS. Those who were familiar with him indicated that he was more ruthless than his father, but without the oratorical skills. None of this was heavily publicised, but those on the inside were aware, and Khamenei always demurred when the question of the succession came up. During Rouhani’s presidency, and the focus on the nuclear negotiations, such issues took a back seat. But following Ibrahim Raisi’s “election” to the presidency in 2021, the question emerged again, in large part because some wondered whether Raisi himself might be being groomed to take the elder Khamenei’s role.

Given his background and character, this was always unlikely, and the reality was that Raisi’s engineered rise to the presidency was done to facilitate Mojtaba’s eventual succession as Supreme Leader. Such was speculation that the elder Khamenei was eventually forced to deny such a possibility, albeit indirectly through an intermediary. He never publicly spoke about it himself, thereby retaining a measure of plausible deniability. But no one basides the most naive could imagine that this, in the best traditions of Iranian political culture, was anything but an exercise in dissimulation, a non-denial denial.

In other words, the succession of Mojtaba Khamenei and the restoration of the hereditary principle has long been in train. His rise has been tied closely with that of the IRGC, and has been part of a project to emasculate the republic and replace it with an Islamic autocracy defined by charismatic leadership. The resilience of the system is not “institutional” — this is not a constitutional system in any meaningful sense of the word; no one loses sleep over the semantics of the constitution — but reflective of personal networks whose allegiance is not to the state but to the Supreme Leader as the manifestation of the revolution which he himself defines.

While it was not illogical to target Ayatollah Khamenei in the first strike of the war, it was far from risk-free. His death no doubt demoralised the faithful, but it probably angered and energised them too. They would have been acutely aware that they had nothing to lose and everything to lose. They also likely know that, following the massacre in January, they can expect as much mercy from the Iranian population as they themselves have shown. It has proved a clarifying moment in a manner they may not have immediately understood; they are bound together as much by their fear of the wider public as their devotion to the Supreme Leader.

In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that the IRGC moved swiftly to have Mojtaba declared his father’s heir. Khamenei, they declared, had returned rejuvenated, the charismatic succession was secure, and the allegiance of the faithful could be counted on. Mojtaba has nonetheless remained very much hidden, his mystique intact, his charisma sustained and managed. His IRGC handlers may want to keep it that way. But, sooner or later, he will have to reveal himself — and then his charismatic authority will truly be put to the test.

Ali Larijani, whom the Israelis assassinated on Tuesday, was a ruthless propagandist who broadcast the “confessions” of dissidents broken by torture, and an apparatchik whose National Security Council oversaw the slaughter of thousands of unarmed protesters in January. Yet his long membership of Iran’s ruling clique at least gave him insight into the country’s external enemies. At a pro-regime rally shortly before his death, he observed that “Trump’s problem is that he doesn’t understand that… the more pressure he applies, the stronger the [Iranian] people become.”

For nations driven by patriotism, religion or both — Iran, the Palestinians, Ukraine, Russia, Israel — capitulation becomes more unthinkable the longer the casualty list. In this, the Iranian regime has form. Drawing on its experience of fighting Iraq in the Eighties, when the Islamic Republic was a production line of commanders going fearlessly to their deaths — recall one-armed Hossein Kharrazi, who was killed while diverting a subordinate away from enemy fire, and is remembered by his men for his valor and self-sacrifice — the state replaces fallen generals and politicians quickly and without fuss.

So far, at least 1,500 Iranians have been killed, including hundreds of civilians; much infrastructure has been destroyed. Now Trump is openly contemplating an invasion of the island of Kharg, off Iran’s southern coast, from where the country’s oil is dispatched to China and other more clandestine markets, while the CIA has been encouraging a rebellion among the Kurds in the country’s western provinces.

All the while, Mojtaba Khamenei, the country’s new supreme leader, who lost his wife, son and perhaps a leg in the attack that also killed his father and predecessor, Ali, promises a life without security for the regime’s enemies, both “domestic and foreign.” His Islamic Republic, a pariah state, tells the world’s most powerful military: bring it on.

That Iran derives strength from adversity and prefers heroic defeat to ungentlemanly victory derives in part from the foundation epic of Shia Islam. In 680, the Imam Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, along with a tiny band of followers, was put to the sword by the powerful caliph, Yazid of Damascus, in what is now southern Iraq. Iran’s sectarian identity works in tandem with cultural exceptionalism. The Persian language emerged from the Arab invasions of the 630s energized and expanded, becoming a tool fit for the works of beauty that Persian poets went on to compose.

Similarly, Islamic beliefs and Persian forms merged to create a new aesthetic, visible in cities like Isfahan and Tabriz, and which spread as far as Central Asia and India. No one, then, has ever accused Iran of suffering from an inferiority complex. Or, for that matter, of excessive deference towards the parvenu Arabs of the Persian Gulf, the Arabs, in the words of an old bit of doggerel, grubbing around for lizards while the Persians sip chilled water.

Since the war began, Iran’s drones and missiles have exacted a death toll of fewer than 50 on the far side of the Gulf, but put the regimes in question, to say nothing of world oil markets, into a tailspin all the same. As for the people of Beirut, bombarded by Israel while calmly receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees from Benjamin Netanyahu’s furious assault on south Lebanon (itself prompted by Hezbollah’s feeble strikes on Israel following the elder Khamenei’s assassination), they poke fun at their neighbors in the Gulf for gathering up their dishdashas and running for the basement at the first sound of tinkling glass.

Many ordinary Muslims thrill to the spectacle of plucky Iran refusing to bow to the oppressors of the Palestinians. Pro-Iran demonstrations were held in Iraq and Pakistan following Khamenei’s assassination, the latter costing at least 22 lives, while, on 11 March, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a majority-Sunni country, pledged solidarity with Shia Iran. “We have but one religion,” he declared in parliament, “and that is Islam.”

Between US and Israeli attacks on military installations, gas fields, and the odd school, Iranian life goes on. Notwithstanding the danger and inconvenience, families convened yesterday to celebrate the Persian New Year, pride of place in homes being given to seven auspicious items (garlic; apple; a brown pudding with a base of wheat sprouts; sumac; the powdery fruit of the jujube-tree; vinegar; and coins), even if the traditional feast of herb rice and Caspian carp (beware: the tiny bones have a habit of lodging in the windpipe) has long been abandoned in favor of more affordable fare.

Yesterday I got through to Ali Dehbashi. An editor and literary doyen living in Tehran, I’d called to wish him Happy New Year. Dehbashi told me that his son Shahab had had a narrow escape that morning, when a house three doors down was obliterated in an Israeli airstrike. The target was Ali Muhammad Naini, the Revolutionary Guards spokesman: not that Shahab had any idea they were neighbors. His father is a pigeon fancier, but when I asked after the birds, Dehbashi told me that two pigeons and a canary had dropped dead from shock at the racket produced by Israel’s war machine. Having the misfortune to live on Palestine Square — which boasts a clock counting down the days to Israel’s longed-for destruction — he went on with typical understatement, “I suppose one is in the firing line.”

At the outset of the fighting, Trump urged Iranians to “take over your government” as soon as the dust had settled, for “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Since then, in one of those cognitive exercises he lets us observe, like a child showing off his ability to join one bit of playdough to another, he has changed his mind. The President now deems a popular uprising unlikely because the security forces “have people in the streets… machine-gunning people down if they want to protest.” A few inquiries beforehand would have saved him from any misapprehension on this score and the world a lot of pain.

The irony of Trump and Netanyahu’s war of liberation is that it has silenced those opponents of the Islamic Republic who continued to agitate for freedom even after January’s massacre. Many had urged Trump to bomb the country to oblivion, placing their hopes in a restoration of the monarchy under Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the last Shah. Now, three weeks into this conflict of unexpected intensity, the true sentiments of the majority are hidden behind an intermittent internet blackout. Treat with caution the prognostications of Iran specialists in the US who haven’t seen the country in decades.

That said, the longer the pounding goes on, the more schools are hit and the more damage is done to buildings of national importance — it’s the meticulously cut mirror pieces adhering to the muqarnas, or stalactite squinch, that fall like dandruff when a bomb slams into the barracks a block away — the greater the likelihood that feelings towards the aggressors will cool.

The authorities are taking no chances. The national police chief, Ahmad-Reza Radan, has warned that should “scum, spies and hirelings”, his catch-all for pro-democracy protesters, return to the streets on the advice of Trump, Netanyahu or Pahlavi, they “will be treated as the enemy… our boys have their fingers on the trigger, defending their revolution, protecting their people and their country.” On Wednesday, three young men were executed for killing policemen in the January unrest.

For all his disagreeable qualities, Larijani’s removal has robbed Iran of an experienced negotiator who might have helped bring the war to an end before the country turns entirely to ashes — one of the reasons, it has been suggested, why Netanyahu targeted him. At present, peace suits neither the Israeli Prime Minister, who on Thursday said that the war would continue “as long as is necessary”, nor those Revolutionary Guardsmen for whom the current hostilities are an opportunity to militarize the Islamic Republic.

In all this, the hardliners may have an ally in Mojtaba Khamenei. His meager credentials as a Shia theologian are far from commensurate with the almost pontifical office, the guardianship of the jurist, which he lately inherited. The new supreme leader owes his elevation to the Guard. Assuming he stays alive — the attack that killed the father is thought to have left the son with life-threatening injuries — the clerical character of the Islamic Republic will fade and it will more closely resemble a uniformed dictatorship with a nationalist character.

Not a day passes without an official warning of threats to the country’s territorial integrity: code for foreign-funded agitations among the country’s Kurdish, Baluch and Arab minorities. But Iran isn’t in danger of falling apart. It isn’t Afghanistan or Iraq, modern confections of mutually antagonistic groups. Rather, it has a natural coherence based on the supremacy of the Persian language; its geographically logical homeland on the Persian plateau, ringed by seas and mountains; and the Shia Islam to which most Iranians adhere.

For centuries, indeed, these strengths have enabled Iran to survive invasions, violent changes of dynasty, famines, tribal uprisings, regicides and years of meddling by imperial Britain and Russia — not to mention the 1979 revolution itself. They will offset the centrifugal forces that Trump seems intent on stimulating. For the true danger to Iran is not disintegration, but implosion.

When Trump and Netanyahu decide that they have had enough, Khamenei and his friends in the Guard will have to deal with the same rotten institutions and ruined economy, the same seething anger and desire for change, that brought the people onto the streets in January — with the difference now that any chance of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s isolation has been foreclosed while Israel will continue to bomb the country and sabotage its institutions on a rolling basis. In the meantime, the “scum, spies and hirelings” haven’t gone away, and they have even less to lose. The police chief shouldn’t book any holidays.

Iran is experiencing the most evil days in its modern history. To mark an earlier catastrophe, the Anglo-American coup d’etat that ejected the country’s legitimate prime minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, in 1953, ushering in a quarter of a century of monarchical despotism, the poet Mehdi Akhavan-Sales composed the following lines which an Iranian friend of mine recently found himself reaching for.

“My house has caught fire, a soul-burning fire,
This fire burns in all directions,
Burning the curtains, the rugs, warp with weft,
I run aimlessly, crying, in the flames of the smoke-laden fire,
And amid my bitter laughter,
And the lamentation of my mirthless tears,
From a burning core,
I scream…”

In 1999, having previously campaigned against Slobodan Milošević’s rule, I denounced Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia. In 2003, after two decades of campaigning against Saddam Hussein, I demonstrated against the US coalition’s invasion of Iraq. In 2011, while critical of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, I opposed the US-led bombings of Libya that turned it into a failed state. Last year, while aghast at Bashar al-Assad’s ruthless reign, I lamented the US-Israeli machinations that turned Syria over to a former Al Qaeda operative. And now, having celebrated the “Woman, Life, Freedom” rebellion after Mahsa Amini’s death in custody, and for many years railed against the Islamic Republic’s theocracy, crony capitalism, brutality to women and minorities, I am writing these lines to condemn, with all my strength, the US-Israeli plan to devastate Iran.

This is not neutrality. This is not “both sides-ism”. This is the duty of the Western Left. When the gang ruling our neighborhood launches an unprovoked attack on a faraway gang that we also don’t approve of, killing innocent bystanders, we refuse to stay neutral or to pick a side. We call out both, but we recognize a special, overriding duty to stop our gang: because it is our taxes funding their bombs, it is our silence that grants consent, it is our governments that are doing the killing, in our name.

So, let’s take a look at our gang. The Western claim that the US and Europe, let alone Israel, want democracy, stability and normality in Iran is a fabrication. The origins of Iran’s postwar tragedy lie in the 1953 Anglo-American coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh, for his audacity to want Iranian oil for the Iranian people. It was then that the US and the UK lost any moral claim as supporters of Iranian democracy by restoring absolute power to the Shah — a venal, autocratic monarch who ran Iran as a feudal fiefdom for Western corporations. To keep him on his peacock throne, the CIA helped to establish and train the Savak, a secret police force so brutal it became a byword for torture. For 26 years, US and UK governments did what they could to deny Iranians any semblance of democracy. A long trajectory of authoritarianism  triggered the 1979 revolution which toppled the Shah.

It was a broad, popular revolution that, initially, mobilized not only Islamists but also liberals, socialists, and communists. However, the secular movements which supported Ayatollah Khomeini and cheered his return from exile in Paris were unaware that Washington had aligned with the most reactionary Islamist factions once it realized the revolutionaries would win. One of the new regime’s first barbarous acts? The rounding up and summary execution of the leadership of Tudeh, the large communist party which had supported Khomeini. This mutual backscratching between Washington and the Islamic regime, during the Cold War, should give pause to Leftists today who labor under the delusion that the Islamic Republic is close to the Left’s anti-imperialist agenda and values.

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There is, of course, a reason why it was fairly easy for Western Leftists to be taken in by the anti-imperialist, more populist elements of the Islamic Republic. Contradictions, in which the Left ought to luxuriate, do not come more intense than in the case of the Islamic Republic — a regime that, on the one hand, adopted anti-imperialist language as part of its overarching project to resurrect a fictitious Islamic golden age while, on the other hand, crushing the Left and its emancipatory agenda.

The confusion deepened in light of the Islamic Republic’s greatest strength. In sharp contrast to the Sunni plutocracies, the Shiite movement led by Khomeini demonstrated a certain commitment to the poor and devastated masses of the Muslim world that included not only income redistribution and, at least initially, anti-corruption drives but also genuine support for the Palestinians whom almost all Arab regimes had abandoned by then. All that offered a rare source of emancipatory hope.

It also predictably led to a head-on confrontation with the Islamic Republic’s Sunni rivals. In 1980, incited by Washington and funded by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. If in doubt that Saddam was America’s stooge, recall what happened when, in 1987, an Iraqi fighter plane fired Exocet missiles at the USS Stark, killing 37 American sailors and wounding 21: President Reagan stated “The villain of the piece is Iran” while US diplomats flew to Baghdad to give Saddam absolution. In 1988, Saddam used chemical weapons on Iraq’s Kurdish villages, attacks the US had known about and were complicit in. Years later, after the US invasion of Iraq, a joke circulated in Washington: “How do you know that Saddam had chemical weapons?”, the White House spokesman was asked. “We kept the receipts,” he answered.

Tehran’s anti-imperialist credentials were also bolstered by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which gave birth to a resistance and social movement funded by Iran: Hezbollah. This allowed the Iranian regime to present itself, with some justification, as the only regional power willing and able to protect from Israeli violence against Palestinians in particular and Arabs more generally — while also providing some basic social services for the poor. Moreover, as inequality reached unprecedented heights in the region, especially after the massive increase in surplus labor globally, Iran’s appeal among the masses burgeoned. Naturally, Iran’s neighboring Gulf states were worried and thus joined forces with the United States to “contain” Iran.

By 1991, a Western family feud had led the US to invade Iraq. Saddam was incensed that Kuwait, which at the behest of Washington and the Gulf plutocracies had loaned him much of the money to wage the eight-year war against Iran, was asking for its money back — and increasing its oil output so much that Iraq’s own revenues faltered. Saddam, either misled by the Americans or, because he misunderstood them, thought he had their blessing to deal with Kuwait by invading it. Once American boots hit sacred ground in Saudi Arabia, Sunni fundamentalism led to the formation of Al Qaeda, the tragedy of the Twin Towers, and Bush the Younger’s calamitous invasion of Iraq which, in turn, begat ISIS, another Sunni terrorist movement. All these developments made the Islamic Republic look moderate and relatively progressive: a country that, while glad to support local popular resistance movements that engaged Iran’s regional enemies (in Palestine, Yemen etc.), never directly invaded any other country and which proved pivotal in the fight against Al Qaeda and, more impressively, in the elimination of ISIS.

In view of this rich, tragic history, the Islamic Republic must be understood as a powerful system born out of a decades-long crisis caused by the US and encouraged by Israel. But it is equally important to grasp its political economy which is at odds with its external anti-imperialist stance and hostile to everything the Left stands for. Since the Nineties, privatization in Iran has been in full swing, with the reformist faction envisioning foreign investment and integration into the world market (essentially the European Union and the UK) as the only vehicle for containing its crisis. At the same time, the conservative coalition under the Revolutionary Guards’ dominance established and controlled privatized enterprises, aimed at expansion into regional markets.

After Trump 1.0 ended Obama’s plan to reintegrate Iran into the Western circuits of trade and finance, the conservative faction opportunistically aligned themselves with China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. However, throughout, they have been implementing deregulation and ending subsidies for the poor, provoking spontaneous popular uprisings which demand social justice. Then, the crash of 2008, which saw China emerge as a stabilizing force at a global scale, motivated the conservative faction to turn even more toward China and Russia in the hope of circumventing US sanctions and ameliorating the tensions their own crony capitalism had caused.

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Fast forward to 2022 when the killing of 17-year-old Mahsa Amini, a Sunni Kurd, ignited the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Western commentators, suffering once more from a case of wishful thinking, imagined that uprising to be pro-Western. It was no such thing. Rather, it combined discontent caused, on the one hand, by rising inequality after Iran’s economy drifted toward a neoliberalism with conservative Islamic characteristics and, on the other, ethnic tensions — especially among Kurds.

That rebellion was defeated not merely by brutal suppression but, more importantly, by invoking the fear of the country’s disintegration — the prospect of Iran becoming a new Syria, or a new Libya, which Benjamin Netanyahu craves and has been trying for years to co-opt the US to bring about. That’s why the regime still enjoys continued support from a large segment of the population, including those otherwise opposed ideologically to the regime: they may hope and pray for the end of the Islamic Republic, but they also consider the disintegration of Iran a worse evil than the current regime. Fully cognizant that Trump and Netanyahu can’t and won’t bring on a stable, democratic Iran, the US-Israeli bombs that are now falling upon them result in greater toleration of the current regime — even by its opponents.

And so, here we are today: Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Ali Khamenei, is now Iran’s new supreme leader. The US and Israel killed his father, his mother, his wife, his sister, and most probably one of his sons. The regime is brutal, unpopular with vast swaths of its own youth, and economically sclerotic. It is also a product of 70 years of Western arrogance and aggression. It is not going to be bombed away. It will not be sanctioned into moderation. What is the Left to do and say in this context?

We must, I suggest, begin by answering the liberal imperialists who ask us: “But what about the women? What about freedom?” To them I say this: the women of Iran do not need F-35 bombs dropped on them by Washington or Tel Aviv. The path to “Woman, Life, Freedom” does not run through the smoking ruins of Tehran. It runs through the defeat of the very powers that have spent 70 years ensuring Iran can never know peace or democracy. The people of Iran must first be liberated from the clasps of the hideous choice between the current regime and a fate worse than Iraq, Libya, and Syria combined.

Our job, as Western Leftists, is to act upon our governments to stop the bombing. To end the sanctions that starve the poor and enrich the regime’s smugglers. To dismantle the propaganda machine that tells us war is peace and occupation is freedom. Then, and only then, can the Iranian people, exercising their own immense power, reclaim their future from both the theocrats and their imperial enablers.

Still, if Seyyed Ali Khamenei had choreographed his own death, he could scarcely have designed a more potent political end. After all, he was not merely Iran’s head of state: he was a religious symbol for Shi’ites worldwide. His assassination — by US-Israeli bombs during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, while fasting and overseeing wartime resistance planning — instantly transcended geopolitics and entered the realm of sacred myth. For supporters of the Islamic Republic, the symbolism is nothing short of miraculous, and among the Shiite population worldwide, it instantly resonates within their collective memory.

Most fundamentally, Khamenei’s death during Ramadan evokes the assassination of Imam Ali, the first Imam of Shi’ism and a central figure in the sect’s political theology. Delivered by a poisoned sword during prayers in Ramadan, Ali’s death was the climax of the first Islamic Civil War — the First Fitna — and was viewed by the Shia as deep-seated political conspiracy that led to regime change and the rise of the Umayyad Caliphate. Over nearly four decades in power, Khamenei — a “Sayyid”, or direct descendant of Ali — had carefully cultivated his public persona on this symbolic (and literal) lineage, presenting himself as a custodian of revolutionary piety and personification of resistance. The manner of his death instantly apotheosized that cultivated mythology into something far more transcendent: martyrdom.

With the Ayatollah’s death as powerful as the killing of the Pope during Easter, Khamenei was elevated overnight to the status of Imam-e Shahid — the “martyred saint.” That symbolism matters far more than many Western strategists appear to understand. In Shiite political theology, martyrdom is not loss but transfiguration. It converts political defeat into moral victory and transforms fallen leaders into sources of enduring mobilization. The assassination has therefore not merely removed a leader; it has mythologized him among his followers. And myth, in revolutionary regimes, is a fount of power and renewal. 

Khamenei’s assassination has already proved a mobilizing force for his millions of followers. Unmoored from the cultural and religious intricacies of the Middle East, the US and Israel wagered that killing the Supreme Leader would expose the fragility of the regime in Tehran and weaken political resolve across the Islamic Republic, causing defections and perhaps even a popular domestic uprising. Instead, his death has rallied the regime’s active supporters — perhaps a quarter of Iran’s 93 million people — while fomenting strong anti-American sentiment and open revolt among Shi’a from Bahrain and Iraq to Pakistan and Kashmir. 

In life, Khamenei was an ardent ideologue whose leadership left Iran isolated and crisis-ridden. One of the last surviving leaders of the 1979 Revolution, he believed it was his divine mandate to preserve the Islamic Republic’s ideological purity: Islamic conservatism, anti-imperialism, self-reliance, and resistance. He systematically conflated Iranian national sovereignty with revolutionary ideology, often sacrificing pragmatic flexibility in service of doctrinal continuity, compromising only when the regime’s survival was at stake. A notable example occurred in 2013, when Khamenei, a stubborn critic of negotiations with the United States, greenlit the talks that led to the Obama nuclear deal, calling it “heroic flexibility”.

As Iran’s relative power declined, sanctions tightened, and domestic legitimacy sank, he leaned ever more heavily into narratives of resistance and victimhood, drawing heavily on Shi’ite mythology — especially Imam Hussain’s martyrdom in the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, at the hands of the more powerful Umayyad Caliph Yazid. In this way, Khamenei framed Iran as the righteous victim of unjust global powers, especially the United States and Israel, whom he labeled the “hegemonic order”. 

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Crisis and conflict management became inevitable aspects of Khamenei’s governance style. He steered the country from one crisis to the next, ruling not in spite of emergencies but through them. But government-by-crisis had a paradoxical effect. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic evolved from a crude revolutionary state into a highly resilient political system. In close partnership with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — with which he forged deep bonds during the Iran-Iraq War — he oversaw the transformation of the regime into a decentralized, hyper-institutionalized, horizontally organized state with multiple redundancies, overlapping factions, and a pervasive security apparatus. The IRGC branches and offshoots expanded into the civilian space, while religious foundations and quasi-governmental trusts (or Bonyads), mushroomed to create a parallel economy to evade US and international sanctions. The system wasn’t designed for efficiency, but to guarantee survival under relentless domestic and foreign pressure.

Over time, this architecture produced a modern total state capable of absorbing shocks that would shatter other regimes. Power in Iran is disaggregated across clerical bodies, security institutions, economic conglomerates, and parallel chains of command. The Islamic Republic is neither a monolith nor personality-driven. The regime treats individuals — leaders included — as expendable in service of its long-term survival. Indeed, the system is expressly designed to absorb loss, from wartime commanders in the Eighties to nuclear scientists and generals killed by Mossad. Succession mechanisms are embedded in the structure itself.

This structural nature is what Trump and Netanyahu overlook, leading to severe miscalculation. The US-Israeli strike was conceived as a classic decapitation blow: remove the Supreme Leader, showcase the state’s weakness, and trigger either elite fracture or popular revolt. Yet this logic reflects a profound misreading of the Islamic Republic. Buoyed by his success in securing regime compliance in Venezuela by removing Nicolás Maduro, Trump may have become overconfident and overplayed his hand in Iran. Its tactical and intelligence achievements notwithstanding, the decapitation has failed to produce any strategic objectives. Quasi-totalitarian Iran is not Saddam’s Iraq in 2003, or Gaddafi’s Libya in 2011, or even Chavist Venezuela under Maduro. 

Under its Islamist and revolutionary garb, Iran is a civilizational state with deep institutional continuity stretching back millennia and a sizable industrial base. It represents a cultural domain shaped by its geography and historical pedigree that goes beyond the Western nation-state model. What’s more, the current regime itself has been forged in decades of war, sanctions, and internal upheaval. Indeed, Iran belongs to an entirely different category of state: a middle power with regional heft and structural resilience.

As such, the systematic destruction of domestic opposition, compounded by hybrid wars and economic sanctions that hollowed out the middle class and tied economic survival to the state, made organic regime change increasingly unlikely absent elite fragmentation and the defection of the security forces. And absent a large-scale ground invasion, an external air campaign was always unlikely to produce systemic collapse — particularly given the dysfunction of the Iranian opposition and their lack of organization inside Iran.

In this light, Khamenei’s martyrdom offers Tehran a rare strategic windfall, serving as a powerful engine of political solidarity by reenergizing the familiar trope of the “righteous victim”: thus overshadowing the regime’s wider legitimacy crisis. In that sense, Khamenei’s death may ultimately strengthen the ideological core of the Islamic Republic more than his decades-long rule ever did. Despite being despised by millions of Iranians who hold him personally responsible for the death of thousands of protestors last month, millions of Khamenei’s own supporters are already occupying the streets in mourning across the country. What the embattled leader struggled to achieve in life — renewed revolutionary fervor — he may now accomplish in death. The regime now possesses a renewed reservoir of spiritual capital — a unifying narrative capable of sustaining elite cohesion through a fraught succession.

That succession is unlikely to produce moderation. If anything, the structural incentives point in the opposite direction. Leadership transitions during conflict, amid national trauma and the fog of war, tend to empower security-first factions with a more nationalist bent. In Iran’s case, the likely outcome is a successor more tightly aligned with the IRGC — the country’s real center of power — and less constrained by Khamenei’s more cautious and restrained approach to geopolitics. More Western-aligned, reformist factions, already marginalized, will hardly resonate in an atmosphere suffused with martyrdom and a siege mentality against what the Iranians view as unprovoked Western aggression.

Ironically, Khamenei himself may have also been a moderating force in at least one crucial domain: nuclear weaponization. Despite his revolutionary zeal and ardent support for Iran’s right to (peaceful) nuclear sovereignty, he maintained a religious prohibition — a fatwa — against the bomb. Guided by the IRGC and Iran’s more realist security establishment, his successor is unlikely to adhere to Khamenei’s theological or ideological qualms. Watching a Supreme Leader assassinated by foreign powers will inevitably encourage nuclear deterrence as the ultimate insurance policy. Indeed, the CIA had already concluded as much before the strike. If anything, then, the killing may accelerate the very nuclear option it sought to prevent. 

This very possibility reveals how Washington suffers from strategic myopia and a lack of endgame in Iran. Instead of coercing surrender, military pressure may radicalize Iranian elites while narrowing the space for diplomacy. Rather than empowering moderates who would engage the US, it validates the worldview of hardliners who have long argued that compromise invites aggression. The upshot is a hardened security state, narrowing the already limited space for internal pluralism. Instead of instigating regime collapse in Iran, the conflict risks producing the opposite dynamic: an escalation trap with no easy off-ramps.

There are other risks too. The opening days of the conflict have already seen the conflict expand, drawing in Iranian proxies and exposing vulnerabilities among American partners in the Persian Gulf. A mission conceived as a decisive blow could metastasize into another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict — precisely the kind of protracted entanglement successive American administrations have pledged to avoid. While a full-on invasion is unlikely and would be a political suicide for the GOP, the war could still escalate and fester as a quagmire Washington can’t soon escape: risking US blood and treasure and a broken global economy for Israel‘s regional ambitions, without any upside for the United States.

Such a scenario carries wider strategic implications. In an increasingly multi-nodal world, prolonged regional wars impose real opportunity costs. They drain resources, strain stockpiles, and divert attention from higher-order geopolitical interests. For a United States confronted with the end of the unipolar moment, another forever war in the Middle East — even absent US troops on the ground — risks accelerating America’s relative decline instead of strengthening its great power status. Given the already transregional and escalatory nature of the war, Iran could easily become the conflict that completes the “rupture” in the rules-based order.  

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None of this means the Islamic Republic is invulnerable. It faces deep structural challenges: economic stagnation, demographic pressures, and periodic explosions of domestic unrest. Its population is deeply polarized, and Islamism itself appears an exhausted ideology even within the regime’s own rank and file. But external decapitation strikes are poorly suited to exploiting those vulnerabilities. On the contrary, they consolidate regimes by supplying precisely what they lack in times of internal strain: a unifying external enemy and a mobilizing myth. 

Ironically, Khamenei’s assassination has handed the Islamic Republic both. It has replenished the regime’s symbolic and spiritual reserves, reinforced elite cohesion, and justified a more hardline security trajectory. In trying to eliminate the man, Washington may have strengthened the system in Tehran.

For a Trump administration that claims to practice hard-nosed realism, this represents a striking miscalculation. It reflects a failure to grasp both the civilizational depth of Iran and the adaptive endurance of the Islamic Republic. Iran is neither a brittle petro-state nor a hollowed-out personal dictatorship waiting to fall. It is a historical power with institutional durability and real material strength. Here, the US-Israeli tactical brilliance — precision strikes, intelligence coups, targeted assassinations — could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory that does not automatically translate into strategic success. 

Amid war, destruction, and political discontent, the Islamic Republic will likely endure — less flexible, more defiant, and newly consecrated by the blood of its fallen leader.

Anyone who has spent a career covering Iran understands two things: first, that the Islamic Republic does not fall because X is excited; and second, that these protests must be considered not in isolation but as part of a larger cycle of resistance that, in its modern incarnation, has periodically strafed the regime since 2009’s Green Revolution. 

The latest unrest did not begin with students or political activists but with shopkeepers: mobile phone and electronics traders in Tehran, among those hit hardest by the currency’s latest plunge. In Iran, economic collapse is visceral. It is experienced in shuttered storefronts, disappearing capital, and the drawn-out humiliation of a middle class being slowly crushed. Time and again, economic shock has supplied the initial fuel for unrest. This moment is no different.

From those commercial districts, anger bled outward — first into surrounding streets, then beyond the capital altogether. As has often happened before, material grievances quickly gave way to political denunciation. What is less predictable is whether rage can be converted into sustained pressure. Iran today is battered by inflation, corroded by corruption, and exhausted by a cost-of-living crisis with no obvious end.

Still, though, history counsels caution. Following the contested re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, millions flooded Tehran’s streets. The movement possessed visibility, leadership, and a claim to legitimacy. It mobilized the urban middle class at scale. And it failed.

Its weakness lay not in its numbers but in its reach. The movement never truly broke out of the major cities. It did not sink roots in provincial or working-class Iran. More importantly, it failed to irretrievably split the system’s coercive core. Yes, the movement’s leaders, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were from the establishment, but they were dealt with expertly. This was the regime’s genius: it didn’t kill or even imprison them. It just kept them confined to their homes without even a working internet connection. The two men became not martyrs but irrelevant. The movement didn’t collapse; it withered.

This is a regime born of revolution. It absorbed the lesson that protests are most dangerous when mishandled — and that selective restraint can sometimes be as effective as selective brutality.

The demonstrations of winter 2017–2018 lacked the global impact of 2009 but unnerved the authorities in a different way. They were driven by economic anger and ignited far from Tehran, beginning in the conservative city of Mashhad before spreading across regions and social strata. The pattern returned with greater ferocity in November 2019, after a surge in fuel prices. The state’s response was ferocious. It killed hundreds; it locked up thousands. It endured.

The killing of Mahsa Amini in custody in 2022 triggered another eruption — this time cultural as much as political. The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests spread rapidly. Their moral force was undeniable. But once again, the system absorbed the shock. The challenge was serious; the damage was contained.

So where does the present unrest sit within this pattern? Participation has not yet broadened into a genuine cross-class movement. The unrest, while geographically wider than Tehran, is still limited compared with earlier episodes. And most importantly, there is no sign of elite defection or security force disintegration.

Western observers routinely mistake visibility for power. But what matters far more than viral imagery is whether labor action spreads; whether oil, transport, or municipal services are disrupted (striking oil workers played a crucial role in the downfall of the Shah in 1979); whether clerical and military elites begin to wobble. None of this is happening yet.

This does not mean the regime is secure. It means that so far, even after the hammering it took at the hands of Israel last June, it remains structurally intact.

There are, however, two variables that could make all the difference. The first is that Iran is in the grip of a severe and structural water crisis — not a temporary drought but an ecological reckoning born of decades of mismanagement and over-extraction. This is a pressure absent from earlier protest cycles — and one the state cannot simply baton away. Protests linked to water scarcity have already flared in Khuzestan and Isfahan. Unlike financial collapse, water shortages do not discriminate. Farmers, laborers, and urban residents are all exposed. More than this, you can terrorize people demanding civic rights back into their homes; those dying of thirst have nothing to lose.

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The second variable is Washington. When Iranians took to the streets in 2009, Barack Obama, with typical stentorian pomposity, warned the Mullahs: “the world is watching you.” Early this morning, on the Truth Social platform, US President Donald Trump had a different message: “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J.TRUMP”

This is a major, possibly existential, problem for the regime. The Mullahs have long preferred selective executions and torture over mass violence, but if even that option is slipping away, they are in real trouble. If Trump announces that the US is “locked and loaded”, the regime must take it seriously. The remnants of its nuclear program are proof of that.

And it’s a message that every Iranian has heard. If people begin to believe they can protest without fear of sweeping state brutality, the regime’s options are sharply limited.

Early this morning, I spoke with a friend inside Iran. “God bless Donald Trump!” he messaged me, only half-joking. “We have no idea what’s coming next, but the anger is greater and the fear is less,” he added. “We’ve lived like this for decades. We are totally sick of it. It’s time for it to go!”

Is it different this time? I ask him. “We don’t know,” he replies. “But now we have the US president behind us! This has never happened before. The regime can murder us, but it cannot take on America.”

He continues: “These bastards will fall eventually. Now maybe we have the best chance we ever did.”

Whether this latest unrest becomes just another chapter in Iran’s long history of dissent, or is indeed something genuinely transformative, still depends on the same unforgiving factors: geographical reach, social convergence, and elite fractures. But one thing is undeniable: the Iran story now has a new leading man, and it’s not an Iranian general, a mullah, or even a protester. It’s Donald Trump.

Yet the ceasefire, for now, is holding. And that means that a rare window of opportunity remains open — an opportunity for transformative diplomacy. After all, the devastating US-Israeli attacks and the retaliatory Iranian missile barrages showed both the power and the limitations of military action. There was no clear winner. But as the fog of that war recedes, a bigger prize could be on offer. If stability in the Middle East is truly the objective, the United States must seize this moment to broker a comprehensive diplomatic settlement with Iran.

To do so, it will need to recognize that the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East has shifted fundamentally. Ever since the 1979 revolution, dialogue between Washington and Tehran has been impeded by myths, biases, and outdated frameworks. Whether or not the West has noticed, though, the chances of rapprochement are becoming more favorable.

Within Iran, the culture has gradually transitioned from ideological fervor to pragmatic nationalism. Decades of economic sanctions and international isolation, combined with generational shifts among Iran’s youth and elites, have tempered the regime’s revolutionary zeal and increased the strategic emphasis on national interests. The Persian civilization, with its rich historical continuity, has reasserted itself, taming the isolationist and confrontational impulses that marked Iran as a pariah state in the late 20th century.

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More broadly, the Great Transition — that is, the end of a period of history marked by unchallenged American global dominance — has redirected American priorities and given the middle powers a better hand in negotiations. Despite taking serious damage from Israeli and US bombing during the 12-day war, Iran remains a civilizational state with a population of 90 million, regional reach, and historical longevity, marking it a resilient middle power. In that brief conflict, Iran launched strikes of its own, overwhelming Israeli and US defenses. The much-touted and expensive US THAAD and Israeli Arrow air defense system together shot down only 201 of Iran’s 574 ballistic missiles, depleting around a quarter of US global stockpiles in twelve days and costing US taxpayers $ 2 billion.

Those missiles will take years to replenish. It is another inconvenience of a conflict that distracts from America’s foremost strategic priority: competing with China. From the prism of national interest, the Middle East is no longer a priority for Washington. Successive US administrations — from Obama to Trump via Biden — have sought to reduce American military commitments in West Asia, reflecting a structural shift in US strategic priorities towards East Asia and China. This strategic retrenchment necessitates a sustainable regional balance. And this balance can be achieved not by isolating and excluding Iran, but by incorporating Tehran as a focal point of a new West Asian security order. Already, Iran has embraced its erstwhile rivals in the Persian Gulf, attempting, with the help of Saudi Arabia, to contain the rise of an expansionist, neo-Ottoman Turkey led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Traditional alliances, in other words, are in a state of flux due to changing regional and global dynamics.

Such geopolitical circumstances recall the diplomatic opportunities seized by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Then, rapprochement with China fundamentally altered the global order, setting in motion a series of events that culminated in the end of the Cold War. President Trump, facing a similar historical juncture, now has the unique chance to reset and mend relations with Iran after 46 years of hostility, potentially reshaping the region’s security architecture for decades to come. It is already the case, as I have argued, that structural changes, and shared interests, have made improved US-Iran relations more likely. But proactive American diplomacy could accelerate this trajectory, allowing Trump to secure a significant legacy for himself: not just international recognition, but even the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

Nonetheless, considerable obstacles remain. Chief among them is Israel’s staunch opposition to US normalization with Iran. Note the timing of Israel’s surprise attack against Iran: 13 June, two days before a pivotal round of talks between Washington and Tehran, which analysts expected could result in a major breakthrough. While Tehran’s revolutionary ideological fervor has waned, Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu has increasingly mirrored zealotry of the early Islamic Republic.

The Netanyahu government has adopted an ideological, Manichean worldview that defines security exclusively through confrontation and perpetual militarization. This worldview has shifted Israel away from the pragmatic and defensive policies championed by past Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin. It is a profound change. The United States’ unconditional support for Israel has been a major cause for the systematic radicalization of Israeli society, promoting hubris, recklessness, and overreach while protecting the country from the consequences of its unrestrained behavior. Within this strategic context, Netanyahu’s neoconservative approach — emphasizing Jewish exceptionalism, religious fundamentalism, and hegemonic expansion — has produced a state perpetually at war, undermining Israel’s long-term security and diplomatic flexibility in pursuit of the quixotic dream of turning Israel into a regional hegemon.

And it is hardly the case that Netanyahu has been, in that respect, successful. Despite repeated tactical victories, Israel’s leadership has failed to convert short-term military successes into lasting peace and regional stability. Rather, the new Israeli establishment uses the spectre of war as fuel for its existential threat narratives, spun to further securitize Israeli domestic politics. In becoming akin to ancient Assyria — an imperial state perpetually at war with its neighbors and driven by militant extremism — Israel risks strategic overstretch, exhausting its resources and threatening its future viability.

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The first Trump administration, motivated partly by its desire to “solve” the Middle East and finally extricate the US by bolstering Israeli power, attempted to form an anti-Iran regional bloc, via the Abraham Accords, that brought Israel together with the Sunni Arab states. Although they brought some level of diplomatic normalization to US allies in the region, the Accords ultimately fell short of addressing the region’s structural imbalances. Iran remains an indispensable regional power, possessing civilizational continuity, a substantial population, significant indigenous technological and industrial capacity, and the resolve to assert its interests. Its exclusion from the regional order perpetuates instability, undermining American strategic objectives and increasing regional insecurity.

Recognizing this, Washington must now pivot towards a diplomatic strategy that integrates Iran within a broader regional security framework. Tehran, pragmatically recognizing the limits of confrontation, has indicated openness to diplomacy that respects its sovereignty, dignity, and core strategic interests. Despite their rhetorical and performative chants against Israel and Western hegemony, Iranian leaders have signaled a willingness to quietly abandon aggressive strategic postures, including dissolving the expensive and geopolitically contentious “axis of resistance” in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean — forsaking its regional allies and proxies like the Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis. In exchange, Tehran seeks political normalization based on the full recognition of its sovereignty, including its right to domestic enrichment and conventional military capabilities, and economic reintegration with Washington and its regional allies.

This emerging diplomatic consensus could take the form of a comprehensive Perso-Abraham Accord, ending entrenched hostility between Iran and Israel and redefining regional security through mutual recognition, diplomatic normalization, and shared economic interests. Such an accord would significantly reduce the US military footprint in the Middle East, aligning with America’s broader strategic reorientation towards Asia. Simultaneously, it would curtail the ambitions of regional powers such as Turkey, whose neo-Ottoman expansionism has alarmed Arab states and Israel alike.

For such an accord to materialize, however, the United States must practice strategic empathy and prioritize sustained diplomatic engagement over coercion. Rather than continuing a counterproductive cycle of sanctions and intimidation, Washington could offer tangible incentives, such as American investment in Iran’s civilian nuclear technology. These incentives would be accompanied by stringent monitoring mechanisms managed through US firms and a regional consortium, whose inspections would replace those of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which Iran now views with suspicion. This approach would simultaneously demonstrate US goodwill and ensure transparency in Iran’s nuclear activities, effectively addressing international proliferation concerns.

Equally critical is the role of Israel, which must acknowledge the strategic folly of perpetual confrontation and sabotage. A reset in regional relations offers Israel a unique opportunity to redefine its security through diplomacy rather than continuous militarization. The alternative — a perpetuation of escalation cycles — not only incentivizes Iran to nuclearize as a means of deterrence, but also risks embroiling the region in a broader war. It is a war that neither Washington nor Tehran desires, and one Israel itself cannot ultimately afford.

Looking at the bigger picture, the recent conflict between Israel and Iran, despite its immediate devastation, has clarified a crucial geopolitical reality: military force alone cannot secure lasting peace or dismantle Iran’s nuclear program permanently. The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” War is never an end in itself, but must have clear strategic objectives that advance core state interests. The Twelve-Day War, and the shaky ceasefire that has followed, have done the opposite. They have destabilized the region, pushed Iran closer into the Chinese orbit, and further entangled the United States in Middle Eastern quagmires — all while signaling to Iran that if it wants to avoid the harrowing fates of Libya and Syria, then it must try to end the Israeli monopoly on nuclear weapons.

A better path to regional stability lies through strategic diplomacy, respect for mutual interests, and the careful incorporation of Iran into a renewed regional security architecture. The time is ripe for such a diplomatic reset, a comprehensive agreement that could not only redefine relations between the US and Iran, but also fundamentally reshape the broader region. Donald Trump, uniquely positioned by history and circumstance, holds the key to this transformative opportunity to midwife the birth of a new Middle East. Choosing diplomacy over perpetual conflict could become the defining act of his presidency, establishing a legacy of statesmanship and peacemaking that not only resonates with his base but also reverberates far beyond his tenure in office.

I know Hatef very well, and not just because it became the longest-running weekly in my native Guilan province. It was run by my mother — and my father, until he died suddenly in March, at the age of 57. And so, in the most literal sense, I grew up with Iranian journalism, and all its triumphs and challenges. I saw censorship and financial hardships, outdated labor regulations and corruption.

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Local firms were often reluctant to put ads in the magazine, while provincial authorities ran a covert sabotage operation against the magazine. It was just too disobedient to be given any extra lifeline. Whenever Hatef ran a story revealing institutional malfeasance, legal repercussions inevitably followed. In June 2001, for instance, the Guilan University of Medical Sciences filed an official complaint after it reported that the number of HIV patients in the city of Astara had reached alarming levels.

It’s hard to get published here. Publicly distributed literature requires a license from the Ministry of Culture. Once that’s granted, a committee for “supervising the press” actively monitors what the newspaper, magazine or website publishes. This ensures they can be disciplined appropriately when needed, and that nothing that “disturbs the public opinion” makes it to print. Those red lines are defined and readjusted rapidly: editors and reporters are supposed to have the presence of mind to know what can go out, and what should be bowdlerized.

These days, for instance, when the morality police harass women in public, newspapers are expected to either ignore them or else rehash the official talking points if something unpleasant happens: underlying health conditions; suicide; drugs. Nor can the country’s costly nuclear program be criticized. All a journalist should write is that this is an entirely peaceful scheme meant exclusively for electricity production.

And for those who go too far? The supervisory committee has been responsible for shutting down hundreds of newspapers and websites. There’s no comprehensive inventory of the publications that have been shut down, though history offers something of a guide. Right after the revolution, in August 1979, over 20 newspapers were banned following an order by Tehran’s revolutionary court. That included Yoldash, printed in Azeri, which was closed for running a caricature of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In April 2000, when Mohammad Khatami was president, a hardline judge called Saeed Mortazavi announced the closure of 18 newspapers overnight. To justify his spree, Mortazavi cited legal passages stating that “criminals” and “clinically insane” individuals weren’t entitled to possess instruments (read: newspapers) that could cause “accidents”.

Mortazavi didn’t stop there. By February 2004, he had personally overseen the closure or license revocation of some 90 publications. His rampage against the reformist press came on the heels of remarks by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, whose incendiary broadsides against newspapers as the bulwark of “the enemy” at home were construed by the judiciary as a declaration of war against the nonconformist press. Mortazavi, the so-called “hangman of the press”, was himself imprisoned, in 2018, for his role in the torture and killing of four political prisoners arrested during the 2009 Green Movement. But he was released before his two-year term ended.

In a press freedom factsheet released in September 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists estimated that “at least” 52 newspapers had been banned by the Islamic Republic since 1979. And while print reporters can plausibly get something out, their colleagues in multimedia journalism have even less space. The tentacles of state media are so far-reaching that the idea of being a television or radio reporter presupposes that you’re an employee of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the entity supervised by the Supreme Leader and with an absolute monopoly on multimedia broadcasting rights. Private broadcasters don’t exist.

The punishment for any infraction, meanwhile, can be worse than unemployment: the Islamic Republic is notorious as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. In 2022, it imprisoned at least 62 reporters. At the same time, journalism education is uncharted territory, and the most distinguished journalists are self-taught, often with degrees in other fields.

Against these odds, though, a sliver of independent, pro-reform newspapers remain. And dailies such as Shargh, Ham-Mihan or Sazandegi have been a thorn in the side of the theocracy. Military commanders, and even the ayatollah himself, launch occasional tirades about newspapers being “counterrevolutionary” outlets betraying their country.

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Independent journalists have broken some big stories. Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi rattled the conscience of a nation with their courageous reporting on the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Iranian morality police in September 2022. They spent 17 months in prison for their work of journalism before being “pardoned” earlier this year. Years earlier, Banafsheh Samgiss, another prominent journalist, was imprisoned after reviewing a book about the role of women in Iranian music.

More to the point, the fact that this sort of reporting is sometimes taken seriously, and generates universal interest, suggests that Iranians indeed appreciate solid independent journalism. Just as important, the striking sensitivity of the Islamic Republic leaders to a free press suggests that they understand critical voices can cut through indoctrination. If people are made aware of what it’s like to live in a democracy, there’s a chance they’ll revolt for change.

Not that we should exaggerate. Many Iranians remain skeptical of domestic reporting regardless of its provenance, even stories emanating from non-governmental media. No less important, state censorship has been so forceful that many Iranians now look for their news abroad: according to one recent poll, a quarter of respondents don’t have any trust in domestic journalism.

Indeed, an increasing number of Iranians rely on diaspora media. That includes Telegram channels run by exiled dissidents; Persian broadcasters in Western capitals; and social media stars who speak the same language as their cynical followers, both literally and figuratively. Crushed by bad governance, jaded Iranians are looking for reports that don’t wrap words in journalistic euphemisms. Rather, they want journalists who have both the ability and inclination to call a corrupt politician a “bastard”.

So if the free press has never been stronger, might the media ultimately foment a more fundamental transition: including revolution in Iran? Let’s face it, over the long sweep of history, journalists have rarely precipitated radical political change absent other ingredients. But in the face of rising international isolation and domestic asphyxiation, even as the specter of a full-fledged war looms large, one fact about Iran has hardly ever been contested. A dynamic if ailing civil society, including a press that raises a voice of dissent whenever possible, prevents the country from becoming the North Korea of the Middle East. I’m sure my father would be proud.

This was a formidable threat to Israel’s survival in its first decades. But nobody there even considered the possibility of striking directly at the Soviet Union itself. Aside from the certainty of a massive retaliatory response, there were simply no relevant targets that Israel could strike, even if its small airforce managed to penetrate Soviet airspace. These days, however, everything is different. The Shi’a militias that have been targeting Israel for years, which greatly escalated their attacks after October 7, are entirely armed and directed by Iran. That’s true right across the Middle East, from Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen to a pair of militias in Iraq. But unlike the Soviet Union, Tehran enjoys no immunity from Israeli action.

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Iran is weaker than we think

By Edward Luttwak

The crucial vulnerability is the money from Iran that sustains the militias. Iraq’s Shi’a fighters can extort some cash from the country’s oil revenues. Hezbollah, for its part, receives some funding from Shi’a diamond buyers in Sierra Leone and smugglers in South America. Yet over the years, it and its cousins elsewhere in the region have become increasingly reliant on the funding they receive from their paymasters in Tehran. Cut the cash off, then, and they will quickly wither because even the most committed must receive their pay to feed their families.

That is most obviously the case in Yemen, one of the world’s least productive countries, where the Houthis are funded by monthly payments from Iran. But Hezbollah too has become more reliant on its Iranian ally, not least because its extortion of airport and customs receipts has yielded less and less with Lebanon’s descent into poverty.

This all means that Iran’s export revenues must now pay for a bewildering range of military expenditures abroad, in US dollars rather than home-made rials. Beyond the upkeep of foreign allies starting with Hezbollah, there are the imported components and supplies consumed by the domestic Revolutionary Guards, with its 125,000 troops and a naval force. This includes the imports of Chinese and North Korean missile and rocket components, as well as the foreign-currency costs of the entire nuclear programme which proceeds at a very large scale.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. It’s true that Iranian farmers grow pistachio nuts and other exportable crops, and that there are some manufacturing exports, even if Tabriz’s famous carpets are out of fashion. Yet at the last count, in 2023, oil accounted for 83% of Iran’s exports. For their part, the merchants who export Iran’s agricultural and craft exports tend not to repatriate the foreign currency they earn, using it instead for the imports they bring in. While much celebrated in regime propaganda, meanwhile, state-controlled industrial exports remain slight.

In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometres off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometres from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeidah in Yemen — a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again yesterday.

Iran has made great efforts to reduce its dependence on the Khark terminal. That’s not because it is too close to Israel, but rather because it was too close to Iraq, and was indeed attacked and burned during the Iran-Iraq war. The result it Iran’s newly opened Jask oil terminal. Out on the shores of the Indian Ocean, it’s much futher from Israel than Khark. But for the IDF’s air planners, that’s scarcely a problem: the oil reaches Jask by a very long pipeline that can be disrupted at points even closer to Israel than Khark Island.

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How America can stop Iran

By Edward Luttwak

Given that Israel could easily cut off Iranian funding for Hezbollah and its other enemies by doing so, why has it refrained from targeting the country’s oil exports? In one phrase: “Obama’s Law”. Tacitly but very forcefully promulgated by the former president, it banned any Israeli or US attacks against Iran, even as the Islamic Republic has continued to kill US soldiers in Iraq and Yemen, and has kept attacking Israel through its proxies. On 13 April, Iran even attacked Israel directly. Stemming from Obama’s great fear that he would be manipulated into going to war against Iran, just as his predecessor was talked into war with Iraq, the then president’s all-out pursuit of a historic reconciliation with Iran utterly ignored the simple fact that the Islamic Republic’s fanatical rulers could not possibly be reconciled with the West. With Obama’s people also staffing Biden’s White House, the US has persisted with this policy of one-sided restraint, which it also imposed on Israel. That’s even as the Ayatollah’s regime has continued to forcibly suppress a pro-Western opposition that hates its corrupt and wasteful rule with a passion. Nor did US policy change when Iran continued to target US allies in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. 

In the event of a Harris victory this November, the Obama crowd would continue to staff the White House. That leaves a narrow window for Israeli action against Iran. To be sure, attacking a vast country of 91 million people would be a reckless act for Israel under any circumstances. But to stop Iran’s oil revenues — whose benefits are denied to its long-suffering population by an oppressive regime that most Iranians bitterly oppose — is quite another matter. Given, moreover, that hyperinflation has brought outright hunger to Iran’s urban population for the first time since the fall of the Shah in 1979, an attack on the country’s oil exports could even trigger the downfall of the regime. There are, of course, very many variables between any Israeli action and such a happy consequence. But if destroying Iran’s oil revenue did finally bring about the end of the Ayatollah regime, it’s not just Netanyahu who would celebrate.